Hebrews 12:1 – Doing the Hard Thing

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.”

Hebrews 12:1

Have you removed everything that hinders you and entangles you? Have I? No. But I’m working on it.

With any relationship, comes great things. In my own relationship, some of the perks that I enjoy are a loving fiancé who constantly makes me laugh. He is the goofiest guy I know with the best sense of humour. We also have very similar interests. We love sitting around on a lazy Sunday afternoon rotating between Mario Party 5 on the Gamecube, Call of Duty on my Playstation, and then a few rounds of Yahtzee when our eyes get tired after staring at the TV for too long. We both value education and plan on getting as much as possible. We both love God with all our hearts.

I promised myself (and technically my readers in a blog post many moons ago) that I would not be the person to blog about my relationship once I had one. Well, I’m kinda breaking that promise – but this isn’t really about my relationship with F (my fiancé, that’s what I call him in my posts). No, this is more about my relationship with God, and how that has been affected by my relationship with F.

With any relationship, comes complications. Now, not everyone can relate to this, as not everyone is waiting until marriage to have sex. We are. (What a shock! The Christian girl is waiting to have sex!) Unfortunately, waiting to have sex is hard. (I know, another surprise.) Without going into too much detail, we have struggled with waiting. No, we have never had sex, but as Christians, we believe there are certain lines that you do not cross, and at some points, we have crossed them. I believe it’s important to be open about these kinds of things, so that when other Christian couples struggle with this, they know they are not alone. They know it doesn’t make them “bad Christians”. They know it’s something we all have a hard time with – because it is a very hard thing to do.

We fell into a pattern. We would “mess up”, freak out, ask for forgiveness, go a few weeks on a “good streak”…and then repeat. repeat. repeat. repeat. It was frustrating. It was messing up our relationship because it created unnecessary tension. All those feelings like we failed each other were not healthy. We were not dealing with this problem in a healthy way. Guilt-tripping ourselves for hours after we’d prayed and asked for forgiveness was in no way helping our relationship with each other or with God.

It was also giving me unhealthy feelings towards what sex would be like. I did not want to enter my marriage (which is only 4 months away at this point) with these feelings. I did not want to enter my marriage with a strong association of guilt and resentment towards my partner with sexual acts. I understand that a non-Christian will not understand this. I understand that a non-Christian will probably believe that what we are doing – waiting until marriage – is already giving me a unhealthy view of sex. I could not agree less, but the point of this blog post is not to argue why I’m waiting until marriage. The point is – what we were doing, was not healthy for us.

About a week ago, we decided to stop kissing altogether. No more kissing. None. It was a difficult decision, but we both felt like it was the best one. After hearing my pastor speak on Hebrews 12:1-3 yesterday in church, I realized we really made the right choice.

Kissing in itself is not wrong. At least, that’s what we believe. The problem with kissing is that it continued to lead us down a path we did not want to go. We didn’t have great self control (as most young people don’t!) and knew that as soon as we started kissing, it typically would not lead to where we wanted to be.

So we stopped it altogether.
We removed what hindered.
We threw off the sin that so easily entangled.

Acknowledging what is hindering you is difficult. Sometimes, you are in denial. Sometimes, you don’t want to stop kissing. But if you are planning on living a Godly life, you need to choose what is more important to you. For us, the choice was our relationship with God or kissing. For a long time, we chose kissing. But our relationship with God won in the end. Sometimes, I can’t believe we went so long ignoring what we knew we had to do. Like I said, it’s hard. It doesn’t mean we were “bad Christians”. It just means we are human. We realized what we had to do, and now we are doing it. It might seem weird or lame or stupid. But we don’t care. We are finally putting our relationship with God above our own feelings and wants and desires.

If you feel like something is hindering you, pray about it. See what happens. Maybe you’ll stop “kissing” too.